A World of their Own
by Astralis
Summary: NS fluff... not much more to say really!


A WORLD OF THEIR OWN  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own them, in case you hadn't guessed.   
  
A/N: A little fluff piece that wouldn't leave me alone. It's not brilliant, but I was in the mood for writing some fluff. At the moment it's a standalone story, but I may add some more at a point in the future. No promises, though.   
  
As usual, all constructive criticisms, hints, tips etc greatly appreciated.  
  
***  
  
Nick Stokes wandered the halls of the Las Vegas Crime Lab, trying to look inconspicous as he ducked his head into every room looking for someone who seemed to have completely disappeared. Coming face to face with Greg Sanders, Nick jumped as the other man siezed him by the elbow. "Nick!"  
  
"Don't do that, Greg. What?"  
  
Greg looked around them, then, satisfied that there was no one nearby, began muttering to Nick, eyes darting from side to side as he spoke. "How brave do you feel?"  
  
Nick blinked. "What? Greg, get to the point."  
  
"Sara's asleep in one of the labs and I need someone to wake her up," Greg explained in a hasty whisper. "She's pissed at me and Archie says he values his life too much. I was on my way to find Jacqui when I spotted you."  
  
'So that's where she's disappeared to'. "All right. I'll wake her up before Grissom or someone else finds her. Which lab?"  
  
Greg told him, and Nick marched off down the hall, grateful to at least have a fixed destination in mind.  
  
"Hey! Stokes!"   
  
Nick rolled his eyes briefly, then stopped and turned to let Warrick Brown catch him up. Warrick did the same thing as Greg had done - scanned for eavesdroppers - before saying, "Hey man, your girl's - "  
  
" - Asleep in one of the labs?" Nick interrupted. "I know. Greg's just told me."  
  
"Greg?" Warrick looked around again. Nick sighed inwardly, heartedly sick of all this cloak and dagger stuff. "Does he know?"  
  
"Hasn't got a clue. He was just looking for someone 'brave enough' to wake her up." They paused their conversation as Leah the lab tech strode past and waited until she was out of earshot.   
  
"Didn't you make her go home at the end of last shift?"  
  
"She told me she just had one last thing to do. She hadn't come to bed when I fell asleep and when I woke up her side of the bed hadn't even been slept in. Bloody rape cases. I shouldn't have left, but you know how it would've looked."  
  
Warrick nodded agreement. "She got the guy."  
  
Nick exhaled in relief. "Well, that's something. Look, I'd better go wake her up before someone finds her and rats her out to the Sherriff about breaking his latest set of protocols."  
  
"By sleeping in the lab or by sleeping with you?"  
  
"Well, you're the only one who knows she's sleeping with me." With that, Nick turned and continued on his way. Sure enough, Sara was in a small, barely used room at the end of the corridor, fast asleep at the table with her head resting on her arms. She looked peaceful, for a change. She deserved a bit of peace after working almost three consecutive shifts, although Nick was willing to bet she hadn't even logged in the overtime she'd done while he'd been asleep in bed. The Sherriff had recently tightened the overtime rules and formalised policies about workplace relationships.   
  
Nick watched Sara breathe for half a minute before kneeling down beside her and putting his hand on her shoulder. "Sara. Sara."  
  
She blinked several times before yawning and focusing on him. "Hey." She blinked again. "What time is it?"  
  
"Time to go home. Shift's over."  
  
"Is it?" Sara looked genuinely surprised. "Oh, crap." She sat up. "I just closed my eyes for a minute. I slept for three hours."  
  
"You're lucky no one found you except Greg and Warrick. Home time. Come on. And this time I'm actually making sure you leave the lab."  
  
A tiny smile crossed her face. "Uh, yeah. Sorry about that." She stood up and stretched, rather like a cat, and followed Nick out of the room and through the corridors to the locker room. "I haven't seen you all night," Sara remarked, much more awake. "Where've you been?"  
  
"Grissom sent me straight to a 419 in Summerlin before assignments. Catherine and I were there most of the night. Warrick tells me you got your guy."  
  
Sara nodded, smiling tightly as she took her purse from her locker. "Uh huh. The next door neighbour."  
  
"Good." Nick paused, looked quickly around him. "I'll see you at home?" he whispered.  
  
"We need groceries," Sara whispered back.  
  
"We'll get them before work. Come home. I'll make you pancakes."  
  
Sara's eyes twinkled. "Now that's an offer I can't refuse."  
  
***  
  
Nick got home first and began pulling out the ingredients for the famous Stokes pancakes. Sara came in a few minutes later, having left after him and then having to head in the direction of her apartment, which was now nothing more than a glorified storage facility. The new lab policies were fairly simple. They were both risking their jobs. Living a double life wasn't fun, but it was the only compromise that could let them have both.  
  
"Hey, Princess," he called over his shoulder, hearing her shut the door behind her and dump her keys on the hall table.   
  
"Hey." She stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her chin on his shoulder. Nick found cooking with Sara hanging off him fairly distracting, but he was willing to rest in her embrace for a minute or two. However, the ringing of Nick's phone broke the moment, as Sara whispered, "You'd better get that." Nick sighed, knowing she hated not being able to answer the phone in her own home in case it was someone from the lab. He went into the living room and picked the phone up, leaving Sara in the kitchen idly stirring the pancake batter. "Stokes. Oh, hey Mom." His mother had long ago instituted a system of ringing one of her seven children each day of the week, and Nick's day, as the baby of the family, had been Saturday. Now, however, she'd come to believe that all her children could cope on their own and rang at random intervals instead.  
  
Nick dropped down onto the sofa that Sara had brought from her apartment and continued talking to his mother. He was catching up on family gossip and all the news from Texas when he heard Sara swear. Two seconds later, a strong smell of burning reached him. Rolling his eyes, Nick made his way into the kitchen and took the frying pan away from Sara. "No, I did hear you, Mom. Hang on a sec, OK, Sara's burning the pancakes - " Ignoring the fact that his girlfriend was childishly poking her tongue out at him, Nick scraped the burnt pancake off the pan and dumped the whole lot in the sink. Sara climbed up on the counter to open the windows.   
  
"Yeah, all right, I'll talk to you next week. Give my love to Dad. Have a great day at work. OK. Bye." Nick pushed the off button on the phone and grinned at Sara, who was sitting on the counter like a small child. "I can't leave you in the kitchen for five minutes, can I?"  
  
"I was hungry," she said innocently, shrugging.  
  
"If you ate properly at work, you would've been able to wait while I finished talking." Nick kissed her nose, noting the streak of flour in her hair. He loved this Sara, funny, playful Sara, the one who almost never came out at the lab. Well, he never stopped loving her, but there was something charming about her in this mood that was missing when she retreated into the protective shell the guys at the lab were familiar with. Leaving her on the counter, he pulled out another frying pan and began to make the rest of the batter into pancakes. "See? This is how you cook pancakes."  
  
"I can cook pancakes."  
  
"You don't cook pancakes, Princess, you burn them. There's a difference." Nick wrinkled his nose at her. "Why are you so awake?" he asked, suspiciously.  
  
"I can catnap. I had three hours sleep. That's good for me."  
  
"Did you sneak a coffee on the way home? You're practically hyperactive."  
  
"Nope."  
  
Nick put the first, perfectly cooked, pancakes on a plate. "You're not going to want to go to bed, are you?"  
  
Sara tilted her head to one side. "Well," she said slowly, "I don't have a problem with going to bed. I'm sure you know how to tire me out."  
  
Sara's cellphone began to ring then, and she pulled it out of the pocket of her trousers. "Sidle. Oh. No, I sent it to Trace. You'll have to ask them. About five hours ago. Yeah. Bye." She hung up and rolled her eyes. "Day shift lab techs. Honestly."  
  
"I've never seen you in such a good mood talking to a lab tech. Sure you're not on something?"  
  
"You know what Catherine told me once? The same thing she told Holly Gribbs just before she died. That when she solved a case she felt like King Kong on cocaine. I got that bastard for the rape, I had all the sleep I needed to get me going again, then I got woken up by my gorgeous boyfriend who wants to make me pancakes." She smiled.  
  
"Either that or you're just overtired."  
  
"Well, maybe, but when I'm overtired I get cross."  
  
Nick put the rest of the pancakes on a second plate and handed it to Sara. "You've been happier lately. I've noticed it. And Catherine commented on it the other day."  
  
Sara laughed, climbing down off the counter. "What'd you say?"  
  
"Just that it was good to see you smile again."  
  
She smiled, grabbing the bottle of maple syrup and some cutlery and leading the way out of the kitchen. "You made me happy again," she said simply and seriously as they sat down on the sofa. "Being here like this - I've never lived with a man before. You let me be myself. I don't have to pretend with you."  
  
"That's because I love you."  
  
"Exactly." Sara drowned her pancakes in maple syrup, then passed the bottle to Nick, letting their eyes meet. "Even six months on, it's just... I can't get over the idea of someone loving me."  
  
Nick surveyed her, the lonely, beautiful woman he had fallen in love with. "You're not so hard to love," he said. "But because you don't believe people could care about you, you push them away."  
  
"Maybe." Sara took a mouthful of pancake, and Nick knew it was because the conversation was hitting too close to home. One thing he'd learnt about Sara was never to push her about personal things. He put some pancake in his own mouth, and they ate in companiable silence.  
  
***  
  
Nick leaned up against the bathroom wall, watching Sara twist her hair back and clip it up, then begin to wash her face at the sink. He continued mesmerised, watching as she finished her face and then brushed her teeth. Finally, she turned to face him. "What on earth were you looking at?"  
  
"You. You're gorgeous." He loved watching her do these simple things in the privacy of their home, away from nosy colleagues and the taint of death and rules that said they shouldn't be together. Just the two of them in their own little world.  
  
"I didn't stare at you while you brushed your teeth."  
  
"No, you just stare at me in the shower," Nick pointed out.  
  
"Go to bed. I'll be there in a minute, OK?"  
  
Nick went into their bedroom, turning off the overhead light and switching on the small lamps at either side of the bed. This room had changed from when he'd lived here alone. Sara had moved in her own chest of drawers and an armchair she'd had in her bedroom, which was currently buried under a pile of clean washing neither of them had gotten around to putting away. A framed photo of the two of them together, taken by Sara's mother on a visit to Las Vegas, had pride of place on Nick's own chest of drawers.   
  
He turned off his cellphone and pager and put them on the table at his side of the bed, then changed into boxers and a t-shirt, dropping his work clothes into the overflowing laundry basket in one corner. It was probably a good thing both he and Sara had lots of clothes, because the only thing they were worse at than putting clean clothes away was washing the dirty ones. Actually, that was probably why they had so many clothes. Sara wasn't particularly domestic and Nick was just lazy.   
  
Sara wandered in, shutting the door behind her, and dropped her pager and cellphone onto the other bedside table. Nick rolled across the bed and switched them both off. "What if someone has to get in touch with me?" she asked.  
  
"They can leave a message." It wasn't the first time they'd had this conversation, and Sara hadn't missed an important phone call yet.  
  
Nick slid under the covers and watched Sara change into a pair of grey pajama bottoms and a white camisole before climbing into bed. Switching off their bedside lamps they lay facing each other in the dark.  
  
"Nicky?"  
  
"Yeah, babe?"  
  
"We need to talk about something."  
  
"OK," Nick said, reaching out a hand to stroke her hair. "What's up?"   
  
"The lease on my apartment is up next month."  
  
"And there's no point in you renewing it."  
  
"Exactly."  
  
"But?"  
  
"What are we going to do with all the stuff that's in it?"  
  
"Sell it, I suppose." Nick realised he'd never really thought about everything that they'd stashed in Sara's apartment after furnishing his with the best bits of both their furniture.   
  
Sara sighed. "Then what do we do with the money? Split it between us? Put it in our joint account? And what happens if..." Her voice trailed off.  
  
"If we break up?" Nick finished the sentence for her, knowing her well enough to work out what she'd been planning to say.   
  
"Yeah," she responded, in a tiny voice.  
  
Sometimes it seemed like there were three people in this relationship: Nick, Sara, and Sara's insecurities. She could be happy and funny, but then the tiniest little thing could bring her insecurities to the fore. Nick suppressed a sigh, trying to be glad she was at least opening up to him, even if she did insist on having this kind of conversation in the dark.  
  
"Well," he began, thinking. "Entirely apart from the fact that I love you so much I don't plan on ever breaking up with you or trying to live without you... look, Sara, it's just furniture, OK? If you ever have to buy another bed, which I doubt you will, unless you're planning on leaving me, we'll split what's in our joint account fifty-fifty and you can use that."  
  
"OK." The voice was still tiny.   
  
Nick moved his hand down from her hair to caress her cheek. "Don't worry about it. Look, we'll call a dealer or something and see about selling that furniture, and then let's... use the money for a holiday," he continued as inspiration struck him. "We could go to California or Florida or somewhere. Up to Canada, maybe."  
  
"We'd have to get time off work."   
  
Nick could tell from her voice that Sara thought it was a great idea, but that she was determined to bring up all the problems and reasons why it wouldn't work so she could talk herself out of being excited and accept what she saw as being inevitable. They'd had the same sort of conversation six months ago when Nick had first raised the topic of Sara moving in with him, and that had turned out better than she'd ever expected.  
  
"We've both got holiday leave piling up." Inspiration hit again. "We could go over Thanksgiving. We could say you're going to California and I'm going to Texas for family things. That's months away, plenty of time to get replacements. Who could prove we weren't telling the truth?"  
  
Sara sighed. "I hate lying."  
  
"Me too, but Sara, we're living a lie. Don't you wish we could go to bed together and wake up together every day? That we could hold hands in public without worrying about being seen? Hell, don't you even just want to get away from Vegas and work for a few days?"  
  
"Yes," she admitted, and Nick could tell she was smiling.  
  
"Let's do it, then. We'll talk about it tomorrow."  
  
"OK." Sara's voice had the air of one conceeding defeat, but Nick suspected it was more relief than anything else. She cuddled up to him and he wrapped his arms around her, breathing in the smell of her shampoo and dreaming of a time when they wouldn't have to hide. 


End file.
